#persepctives

© Colin Scott Johnson

Keythaw Village Before Dawn

Perspective is everything.

Recently, I decided that I no longer wanted a person in my life. Mr. R, as we will name him, was a mutual friend of my closest circle of male friends.

For the last 2-ish years, he has been orbiting me, like a moon does a planet, and to be blunt, we really didn't interact too much.

In the last 6 months, however, we sort of collided, and started interacting more. Playing Starcraft 2, playing videogames, hanging out IRL, and some of the things he began to say truly annoyed me.

And it's not as if he just recently came out and said these things to me. He once said, " If you were gay, I wouldn't play starcraft with you." And to that, I sort of chuckled, and ignored it. After about a trillion misogynistic things more were spewed from his mouth, I started to secretly despise him.

Last week, I deleted him from my Xbox live friends, his number from my phone, and today, deleted him from my facebook friends.

In the wake of this, I wonder, was I lying to myself before when I forgave his faults? In a black and white way, I was lying to myself. But is it more complicated than that?

The perspectives we take, both in time and in position, truly do determine how our actions can be defined. In terms of the past me, I wasn't lying to myself. The truth was that it was more complicated than a few hasty decisions about what is fair and moral.

And yet, in retrospectacles, it is utterly clear that I was deceiving myself.